FRIDAY, SEPT. 30, 2011

When I go to the grocery store with my 90-year-old mother, I always make her put her cart ahead of me in line so I don't watch strangers get exasperated with her as she counts out her money. (I get exasperated with her but try...

THURSDAY, SEPT. 29, 2011

The Amanda Knox appeals trial will soon yield its verdict: will her conviction be overturned, allowing her to come home to Seattle? When I was a woman of 20, I spent a year in Florence, Italy, as a college student. Our class of American students,...

My great-nephew, Matthew, will turn 16 in two weeks. On his Facebook page, he wrote: "I'm older than Google!" A friend of his same age wrote back: "Tell your grandkids that one day. They won't believe it!" Matt was born in 1995. Google, according to...

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 28, 2011

Any The Big C fans out there? Paul, the wife of the main character (who has terminal cancer) dies of a heart attack in the Showtime season ender, which aired Monday. As a death and dying issues blogger, I love the series for its interesting...

TUESDAY, SEPT. 27, 2011

Quitting can lengthen your life, lessen health woes and make you smell better, too. And today, yet one more reason from HealthDay. It may help improve your everyday memory. The team at Northumbria University in Newcastle, the United Kingdom, gave memory tests to 27 smokers,...

MONDAY, SEPT. 26, 2011

We continue to read about them each week – soldiers killed in Afghanistan. It is good to pause, to honor, to read their story and hold their loved ones in our hearts. Sgt. Tyler Holtz, 22, a member of the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment,...

Sinead O’Connor, the singer who once tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II while on Saturday Night Live, has threatened to shoot Pope Benedict if he visits Ireland, according to CathNewsUSA. Her friends worry about her mental health. Wonder if she'll get the...

John Kaplan, the subject of my Sunday story, took a photo early in his career in Spokane (around 1982 or 1983) of a man in a bunny costume (selling doughnuts on Easter Sunday). During his break, the man removed the bunny head and smoked a...

SUNDAY, SEPT. 25, 2011

In my Sunday story today, John Kaplan, a former Spokesman-Review photographer, talks about the documentary he's made detailing his cancer journey. The University of Florida photojournalism professor told me he told himself he would quit photographing, and videotaping, the journey if it started not to...

SATURDAY, SEPT. 24, 2011

Our boomer generation is again making headlines as we become grandparents: The newer grandparents are still working, with greater disposable income and now make up 1 in 4 adults. And more than ever, grandparents are once again parents - to their grandchildren - either offering...

This past week at work, I spent about one quarter of my time on Spokesman-Review website work, blogging, facebooking and tweeting. And three quarters of my time on print product work, interviewing, writing and working on stories that will appear in our newspaper this weekend...

FRIDAY, SEPT. 23, 2011

Executed killer Lawrence Russell Brewer requested this for his final meal Wednesday: Two chicken fried steaks smothered in gravy with sliced onions A triple meat bacon cheeseburger with fixings on the side A cheese omelet with ground beef, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers and jalapenos A...

THURSDAY, SEPT. 22, 2011

Two weeks ago, a University of Washington student, Sarah Ward, emailed me with this request: I am taking an interviewing class this quarter in which I need to have an informational interview with someone, that I do not know, in my field of choice. I...

Where do people die? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked at that question and compared data between 1989 and 2007 to answer it in a press release today. Of 700,000 people 85 and older who died in 2007: 40 percent died in nursing...

Out of Australia this morning from OfficialWire: A morbidly obese man had to be removed from his Melbourne house with a forklift in a medical rescue that took almost four hours. More than 15 paramedics and firefighters were involved in the delicate removal of the...

Paula Davis, funeral director at Heritage Funeral Home in Spokane, truly puts some fun in funeral home, to use the cliche. One to two times a month, she hosts lunches at the funeral home. She invites people she knows in civic and history groups and...

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 21, 2011

A relative has been sitting for four hours in an Inland Northwest emergency room waiting room with her daughter, who has pneumonia. The wait is long, so she is texting us updates on emergency room conversations. Here's one: "The people next to me are three...

After two years in a Tehran prison, two Americans are headed for home after $500,000 bail for each man was posted. Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal were arrested along the Iran-Iraq border in July 2009 and sentenced last month to eight years each in prison....

TUESDAY, SEPT. 20, 2011

We grieve the loss of loved ones, but today I wonder about the grief created by the loss of place. Not a home, but a work space where people evolved into a community of supportive colleagues, caring for each other as they went about their...

MONDAY, SEPT. 19, 2011

Carolyne 'Chevy''Pickup sent my editor this email about the "Speaking with the Dead" workshop Oct. 8 at Spokane's South Hill Library, 3324 S. Perry. Will let Pickup describe it in her own words: When someone we care about passes away conventional religious practice is to...

Over the weekend, the families of Eleanor Mondale and Kara Kennedy announced the death of their two loved ones. Both women were 51. Eleanor died of brain cancer. Kara of a heart attack, though she had lung cancer in 2003. Both had led interesting lives,...

SATURDAY, SEPT. 17, 2011

Most movies do a poor job of depicting death in any realistic manner. So I'm calling on EndNotes readers to imagine more realistic movie plots that contain a death or two. Or keep to the convention and have wild plots that contain highly unrealistic death...

St John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, and Donald Jackson, scribe to the Queen of England, have completed an amazing project: the only hand-scribed and illuminated bible (well, in the last 500 years). The St John's Bible project began with a conversation between the renowned scribe...

FRIDAY, SEPT. 16, 2011

Everyday, I read about something new to worry about. A few weeks ago, I read that dishwashers can contain a nasty fungus impervious to hot water and detergent. In Monday's Earthweek column, Steve Newman reports that a University of California geophysicist is worried that that...

Christian televangelist Pat Robertson has infuriated many of his viewers with his comment that a person is within his/her moral right to divorce a spouse who has Alzheimer's disease. The extremely conservative pastor defended his stance by saying that Alzheimer's disease "is a kind of...